Name: BBC Singers and Castalian String Quartet
Start: 2024-06-17T00:00:00.000Z
End: 2024-06-17T00:00:00.000Z
Location: Snape Maltings Concert Hall

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Aldeburgh Festival

Britten Pears Arts

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Sofi Jeannin

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Castalian String Quartet

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BBC Singers

BBC Singers and Castalian String Quartet

Snape

Wielka Brytania

Snape Maltings Concert Hall

BBC Singers and Castalian String Quartet: Cinq Rechants Messiaen (+2 More)

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Cinq Rechants

blue hills beyond blue hills

String Quartets, op. 76

Saileshwaran Thirumurthy

Approved

Judith Weir’s beautiful oratorio charts the changing seasons of the year, and is perfectly complemented by Haydn’s “Sunrise” Quartet and Messiaen’s Cinq Rechants – a unique masterpiece of 20th-century music.
This programme flows from Judith Weir’s longstanding relationship with the outstanding vocal ensemble the BBC Singers. She describes her “blue hills beyond blue hills” as “setting to music around 55 brief poems by the Scottish poet Alan Spence, mostly haiku, with occasional tanka (another, slightly longer, Japanese form). I have also included a couple of quotations from the historical Japanese poets Issa and Basho”. The poems “follow the progress of a year, and portray the passing of time through small changes in nature and everyday life. I have selected poems from these collections to create a five-movement cycle which approximately follows the seasons, starting with spring, through summer, autumn, winter and ending with a hymn to the New Year”. It is a work of supreme beauty and grace.

It is performed alongside Judith’s own choice of Haydn’s “Sunrise” Quartet, played by the exceptional Castalian Quartet, described as “terrific: violinists who seem capable of anything, layering a gleaming finish (often the key to a really luminous quartet sound) on a viola player with a tone like crushed velvet, and a cellist who sounds like old gold” (The Spectator). Its magical opening evokes the dawn of a new day.

The concert is completed by another major Messiaen work, the Cinq Rechants, “perhaps the most personal and unbuttoned of all his works, setting texts of his own with an invented Sanskrit-like language, and depicting the sexual act itself in its central movement. It’s simultaneously earthy and refined, and not like anything else in the 20th-century choral repertory” (The Guardian).

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